Better Homes and Corpses by Kathleen Bridge is the debut cozy in the Hamptons Home & Garden Mystery Series set in the swanky east-end of Long Island, NY (available August 4, 2015).

In between scouring estate sales for her new interior design business, Cottages by the Sea, Meg visits the swanky East Hampton home of her old college roommate, Jillian Spenser. But instead of seeing how the other half lives—she learns how the other half dies. Jillian’s mother, known as the Queen Mother of the Hamptons, has been murdered. Someone has staged a coup.

When she helps a friend inventory the Spensers’ estate for the insurance company, Meg finds herself right in the thick of things. Cataloging valuable antiques and art loses its charm when Meg discovers that the Spenser family has been hiding dangerous secrets, which may have furnished a murderer with a motive. As Meg gets closer to the truth, the killer will do anything to paint her out of the picture…

Berried Secrets by Peg Cochran is the debut cozy in the Cranberry Cove Mystery Series featuring Monica Albertson, who discovers a dead body floating in the farm's lake (available August 4, 2015).

When Monica Albertson comes to Cranberry Cove—a charming town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan—to help her half-brother Jeff on his cranberry farm, the last thing she expects to harvest is a dead body.

It seems that Sam Culbert, who ran the farm while Jeff was deployed overseas, had some juicy secrets that soon prove fatal, and Jeff is ripe for the picking as a prime suspect. Forming an uneasy alliance with her high-maintenance stepmother, Monica has her hands full trying to save the farm while searching for a killer. Culbert made plenty of enemies in the quaint small town…but which one was desperate enough to kill?

Chapter 2

Monica thought about what the farm’s accounts had revealed while she cleaned lettuce and sliced tomatoes for a salad. Probably the best way to break the news to Jeff was to do it quickly—like pulling off a bandage in one swift motion. She grimaced at the thought.

The Secrets of Lake Road by Karen Katchur is a chilling debut about a seven-year-old girl who goes missing from a summer town (available August 4, 2015).

Jo has been hiding the truth about her role in her high school boyfriend's drowning for sixteen years. Every summer, she drops her children off with her mother at the lakeside community where she spent summers growing up, but cannot bear to stay herself; everything about the lake reminds her of the guilt she feels. For her daughter Caroline, however, the lake is a precious world apart; its familiarity and sameness comforts her every year despite the changes in her life outside its bounds. At twelve years old and caught between childhood and adolescence, she longs to win her mother's love and doesn't understand why Jo keeps running away.

Then seven-year-old Sara Starr goes missing from the community beach. Rescue workers fail to uncover any sign of her—but instead dredge up the bones Jo hoped would never be discovered, shattering the quiet lakeside community's tranquility. Caroline was one of the last people to see Sara alive on the beach, and feels responsible for her disappearance. She takes it upon herself to figure out what happened to the little girl. As Caroline searches for Sara, she uncovers the secrets her mother has been hiding, unraveling the very foundation of everything she knows about herself and her family.

Summer's flying by and The M.O. is sweating with panic over the theme “Lesson Learned.” Write us a crime story in your blue book of one-thousand to fifteen-hundred words.

The theme can be interpreted widely, in whatever style, tone, subgenre, targeted age range, and/or era the writer chooses. If you've ever read stuff like it here, we're interested in more!

On Friday, August 14th, 2015, a trap door will open over the oozing pit of submissions—or is that just the cafeteria?— at 12:01 a.m., Eastern U.S. time zone, releasing toxic fumes for two whole weeks. Here's where to check out all The M.O.'s submission guidelines and important dates!

If you're looking for the perfect way to decorate your own personal domicile, look no further than these awesome BreakingBad-inspired figurines courtesy of Mezco Toyz.

Between the Heisenberg pillows, the Saul Goodman and Gus Fring figurines, and the plush purple teady bear from the Wayfarer 515 airplane crash, fans yearning to return to New Mexico should be pleased. And us? While we might not be ready to fully break bad, we are definitely ready to look badass with our new Jesse Pinkman bobblehead.

Best Laid Plans by Allison Brennan is the 9th thriller in the Lucy Kincaid series where the FBI agent is tasked with finding the killer of a congresswoman's husband, who was last seen with a teenage prostitute (available August 4, 2015).

Newly minted FBI Agent Lucy Kincaid is settling into her job in San Antonio, Texas, when the corpse of Harper Worthington, the husband of a sitting congresswoman, is found naked in a motel on the wrong side of town. It's up to Lucy to locate the last person to see him alive: a teenage prostitute who seems to have vanished into thin air.

When forensics determines that Harper was poisoned, Lucy and her new by-the-book partner dig deep into his life to find out who might want him dead. Why did Harper lie to his wife and his staff? Was he involved in an illicit affair? Embezzling money? Laundering money for a drug cartel? Or was he simply a pawn in someone else's dangerous game?

Lucy's boyfriend Sean Rogan is hired by Harper's company to run a security audit, causing friction between Lucy and the FBI. But when Sean finds a high-tech bug in Harper's office, an entirely new threat emerges—a far-reaching conspiracy run by a ruthless killer who will do anything to get what he wants, and kill anyone who gets in his way. And the person between him and victory is Lucy Kincaid.

Road trip – had to be a winner, right? As a kid growing up in the narrow streets of northern England, I knew America as surely as I knew the grey concrete of my own back yard. For years, I had a recurring dream; I was driving along a winding coast road – steep rocky hills to the right, clear skies above – and dropping away to the left, grassy slopes and a sea so blue it would break your heart. It was California – no question in my mind. The hardboiled language and differences in culture portrayed in film adaptations of RaymondChandler’s and Dashiell Hammett’s novels fascinated me: guns and cars and whisky-drinking women, the paradox of claustrophobic cities, and vast empty landscapes. They influenced my first attempts at writing, and because Humphrey Bogart played both Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, he spoke the words in my head.

At that time, British crime fiction was written by a wealthy, privately-educated elite and aimed at an aspiring middle class. Murder was a polite affair, conducted off-stage and with the minimum of blood, to present a pleasing puzzle to readers. Poor, working-class folk featured only as servants, “actresses” of questionable virtue, and dodgy characters set to enliven a scene. In my teens I read some, enjoyed a few, but felt alienated by most of what I read. I was drawn to the mysteries and thrillers on my father’s bedside table – Hammett, Ross Macdonald and the hard, uncompromising world of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. The thrill of all that unencumbered dialogue! For me dialogue is like music – it has a rhythm and tone, a pace and lyricism which is unique to each place. Writers like Dennis Lehane and Elmore Leonard have superseded those early influences, fulfilling my appetite for the kind of dialogue, which, as John Fowles put it, “perform(s) other functions.” Thomas Harris appeals to my gothic sense of the dramatic, while Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series satisfies my inner geek (I am science-trained, and my novels feature a forensic scientist). Whichever way you look at it, American fiction remains key to my own work, so when my agent suggested setting a novel in the United States, I was eager to grasp the chance. I readily swapped Marlowe’s 1938 Plymouth for a Jeep Grand Cherokee, already dreaming of dusty roads and rodeos.

Grab your boomsticks, Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead fans, because the new “horror sitcom” for Starz is Ash vs. Evil Dead, where he returns to battle the numberless, ravening hordes of the abyss!

If you haven't seen the original quadrilogy of cult films, beginning with The Evil Dead (1981) and products of the unholy team of Bruce Cambell, director Sam Raimi, and producer Rob Tapert, the return of this “hero” and his narcissstic, shallow awfulness may not (yet) fill your heart with warmth. But more bad things have happened to Ash than anyone else who's survived dancing with the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. For each time he asks for “some sugar,” he suffers, and mightily. Think of him like the Homer Simpson of horror, with a chainsaw for an arm, and get ready to enjoy the delighful despair of having only an over-the-hill, capital-L-loser and blowhard to champion all of humanity.

Promising good things, the team's back together for this series, and Sam Raimi will direct the first episode as well as writing for it. Jill Marie Jones, who you may recognize from Sleepy Hollow, will play Michigan State Trooper Amanda Fisher. Ray Santiago, Dana Delorenzo also star, along with Lucy Lawless who plays a mysterious figure named Ruby who blames Ash for... well, every terrible thing that's happened. Really can't blame her for that. The series premiere is October 31, 2105—natch.

Why don’t we ever hear about Australian crime dramas? All nations have crime. They all experience murder. If their local film industries have advanced beyond talking heads and news, you can be sure they’ll make TV shows about crime and murder and the cops who have to deal with it. By now, we’re all aware of the massive corpus of British police and detective shows (if not, go check out Acorn TV); much less known in the U.S. are the various French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, Japanese and Korean crime series. We Yanks don’t like to read our televisions.

Down under, the characters speak English (of a sort) and the Australian criminal justice system isn’t any more exotic than the British one. Their police officers even carry guns. Get the accents sorted, and you can see that their cop shows are just as worthy as American ones…if you can find them.

Ms. Rule broke out with her first book, “The Stranger Beside Me,” published in 1980. In it she profiled [serial killer Ted] Bundy, whom she got to know while sharing the late shift at a Seattle suicide hotline. Bundy, who was executed in 1989 in Florida, confessed to 30 homicides in several states....

J.B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Book Shop in downtown Seattle, said Ms. Rule did more than 15 book signings in the store throughout her career....

“She had a knack for getting under the skin of the killers and the victims to really make them well-rounded characters and people. They weren’t just flat figures on a page.”

Read the whole article for more on her background and bibliography.

While writing principally about stories with connections to the Pacific Northwest, Ann Rule sold over 20 million books and redefined the narrative approach to true-crime forever. Not bad for a woman who used to have to publish under a man's name for “believability.” May we offer our appreciation and sincere thanks for all the words.

A Pennsylvania man hoped paramedics would be willing to fix his broken air conditioner, but he's been charged with obstructing emergency services, because his medical emergency turned out to be bogus. According to the Smoking Gun:

Travis Turner called 911 complaining of chest pains, then told medics he was fine but needed help fixing his broken air conditioning unit. The police say Turner has made a whopping 60 bogus calls to 911 over the last few years. What makes this one call a bit different is that a real emergency call came in while medics were out dealing with him. This puts the call in the “endangered the welfare of a true medical patient,” category. Not very cool (pun intended).

Turner is now slated for a preliminary hearing in August on two misdemeanor charges.

Brush Back by Sara Paretsky is the 18th novel featuring Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski, who'll reluctantly investigate the case of a hateful woman from the old neighborhood, convicted of killing her own daughter decades ago (available July 28, 2015).

No one would accuse V. I. Warshawski of backing down from a fight, but there are a few she’d be happy to avoid. High on that list is tangling with Chicago political bosses. Yet that’s precisely what she ends up doing when she responds to Frank Guzzo’s plea for help. For six stormy weeks back in high school, V.I. thought she was in love with Frank. She forgot about him until the day his mother was convicted of bludgeoning his kid sister, Annie, to death and did a full twenty-five years for her daughter’s murder.

Newly released from prison, Stella is looking for exoneration, so Frank asks V.I. for help. V.I. Stella hated the Warshawskis, in particular V.I.’s adored mother, Gabriella, but life has been hard on Frank and other childhood friends, still stuck on the hardscrabble streets around the dead steel mills. When V.I.'s grudging few questions lead her straight into the vipers’ nest of Illinois politics and a beating at a youth meeting in her old hood, her main question becomes whether she'll live long enough to find answers.

This special excerpt is offered by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Chapter 1Shortstop

I didn’t recognize him at first. He came into my office unannounced, a jowly man whose hairline had receded to a fringe of dark curls. Too much sun had baked his skin the color of brick, although maybe it had been too much beer, judging by those ill-named love handles poking over the sides of his jeans. The seams in the faded corduroy jacket strained when he moved his arms; he must not often dress for business.

“Hey, girl, you doing okay for yourself up here, aren’t you?”

I stared at him, astonished and annoyed by the familiarity.

“Tori Warshawski, don’t you know me? I guess Red U turned you into a snob after all.”

Tori. The only people who called me that had been my father and my cousin Boom-Boom, both of them dead a lot of years now. And Boom-Boom’s boyhood friends—who were also the only people who still thought the University of Chicago was a leftist hideout.

“It’s not Frank Guzzo, is it?” I finally said. When I’d known him thirty years and forty pounds ago, he’d had a full head of red-gold hair, but I could still see something of him around the eyes and mouth.

“All of him.” He patted his abdomen. “You look good, Tori, I’ll give you that. You didn’t turn into some yoga nut or a vegan or something?”

“Nope. I play a little basketball, but mostly I run the lakefront. You still playing baseball?”

“How old is he?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest: Frank always thought someone or something was going to be the real deal that made his fortune for him.

“He’s fifteen now, made varsity at Saint Eloy’s, even though he’s only a freshman. He’s got a real arm. Maybe he’ll be another Boom-Boom.”

Meaning, he could be the next person to make it out of the ’hood into some version of the American dream. There were so few of us who escaped South Chicago’s gravitational pull that the neighborhood could recite our names.
I’d managed, by dint of my mother’s wishes, and my scholarships to the University of Chicago. My cousin Boom-Boom had done it through sports. He’d had seven brilliant seasons with the Blackhawks until he injured his ankle too badly for the surgeons to glue him back in any shape to skate. And then he’d been murdered, shoved off a pier in the Port of Chicago, right under the screw of the Bertha Krupnik.

When Boom-Boom and Frank hung out together, Frank hoped he’d be a real deal, too, in baseball. We all did—he was the best shortstop in the city’s Catholic league. By the time I started law school, though, Frank was driving a truck for Bagby Haulage. I don’t know what happened; I’d lost touch with him by then.

Maybe he could have been a contender. He wasn’t the only kid in South Chicago with a spark of promise that flared up and died. They start to spread their wings and then they fall to earth. It’s hard to leave the world you know. Even if it’s a painful place at times, you grow up learning how to navigate it. The world north of Madison Street looks good on TV, but it has too many hidden traps, places where a homey can make a humiliating mistake.
Perhaps Frankie Junior would have the drive, the mentors and the talent to be another Boom-Boom. All I said was I hoped Frank was right, it would be great.

In the current storyline in DC’s Batman and Detective Comics, Jim Gordon’s shaved his mustache, ditched the overcoat, and done some serious body sculpting for his new job—the pilot of a new robotic Batman suit that is protecting Gotham, because the real Batman is feared dead from a final confrontation with the Joker.

I thought Jim Gordon had reached the height of popularity when an entire show, Gotham, was built around him.

No. Not even close.

Because now he’s Batman.

It’s quite a pinnacle for a character introduced in 1939, who stayed in the background for decades, and then was shown as an ineffective bumbler in the Batman (1966) television show.

Lord of the Wings by Donna Andrews is the 19th cozy mystery in the Meg Langslow series set amidst the spooky Halloween festival that's overtaken Caerphilly, Virginia (available August 4, 2015).

Donna Andrews’ nineteenth Meg Langslow Mystery, Lord of the Wings, finds her fictitious town of Caerphilly, Virginia smack in the middle of a ten-day Halloween festival. Nobody in Caerphilly does anything by halves, so it’s hardly a surprise that Meg’s neighbors have turned decorating for the festival into a bit of an arms race:

…this year, Caerphillians had applied to their Halloween decorating the frenzy they usually saved for Christmas. The local craft store had made valiant efforts to keep up, pumping tons of black and orange decorations into the local economy. The more energetic house holders had made pilgrimages to larger craft stores and Halloween emporiums in Richmond and Washington, D.C., and not long ago, at one of Trinity Episcopal’s potluck suppers, I’d spotted two matrons off to one side, in furtive conversation. I sidled close enough to eavesdrop and found that one was lending the other her collection of mail order catalogs with a good selection of Halloween merchandise.

For most people, a royal flush spells certain victory, but for Christian Lusardi of Fayetteville, North Carolina, it might very well spell prison. When workers at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, went to investigate the cause of a clogged pipe, a wild discovery was made: counterfeit poker chips with a tournament value of $2.7 million had been flushed down the toilet. The Borgata Winter Poker Open, the tournament at which the fake chips were used, was put on hold while officials sorted out what to do next.

The proceeding investigation led authorities to arrest Lusardi on charges of theft and rigging a public contest. Lusardi is believed to have introduced the counterfeit chips on multiple occasions, and is noted to have won $6,814 in the tournament. The investigation is still ongoing.

Stray dogs and more Englishmen! Once Hannibal was captive, I felt safe vacating, so “The Great Red Dragon” is a late write-up. This episode had a dash of everything I love and may mourn if alternate media saviors don't intervene to #SaveHannibal.

The Baltimore State Hospital has inherited Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), and Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) seems to have inherited his taste in furnishings—check out her swanky, antiquified office. That's hardly possible with stony-broke state budgeting. Perhaps Margot Verger made a donation or endowment or something. I witnessed a variety of bad ideas, from giving Hannibal apparently crystal stemware from which to drink wine (while everyone in the group TV room gets juice boxes, I'm sure), to the fact that apparently Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) lets the ghoulish chef prepare blood-based desserts. A kitchen...Hannibal....what could possibly go wrong? The legally-demented doc must be using knives, because there were adorable plate garnishes, too. He's also made clear that he still intends to polish off Alana at the time of his choosing, so that Lucite doesn't look thick enough to me.

All these comforts seem so very unwise, but what the heck? I was glad to see it. The Baltimore State Hospital would be no darned fun without capricious standards and institutionalized hubris! As long as Hannibal's happily locked up, enjoying the heavenly concerts of a boy soprano (Aiden Glenn) in the timeless grandeur of his memory palace, he'll stay put. Probably.

That’s Ray’s opening complaint, as we pick up from last week’s cliffhanger. He’s learned that the event he considers his personal Rubicon—when Frank Seymon (Vince Vaughn) slipped him the identity of his wife’s rapist—was a setup, that he was sent after the wrong guy, to put him in Frank’s pocket. He’s ready to kill over it. The two men sit at breakfast with .45’s aimed at each other under the table.

But cool-as-ice Frank talks him down. It’s been six episodes, but Frank is finally believable as the ice-cold kingpin, not quivering an inch, and like Satan himself, convincing his minion that he’s done all this for and to himself, and the devil was only an innocent bystander. This plays with Frank’s early philosophy that as a pimp and drug dealer, he’s an innocent middle man between people and their vices. “You were selling, but I wasn’t buying.” They leave as partners, with Ray (Colin Farrell) trading the Caspere sex-party info for the identity of whoever sent Ray to kill the wrong man. That’s contingent on Ray retrieving the lost hard drive of rich-people kinko sex, so we can see how the next episodes must unfold.

Ani (Rachel McAdams) and Paul (Taylor Kitsch) are working the torture cabin scene, where Katharine Davis (Michael Hyatt) keeps them focused on the blue diamonds and the party girls. Compressed once again into eight episodes, True Detective threatens to burst open, like ten pounds of story in a five pound bag, and Michael Hyatt’s iron-clad performance helps glue the story together.

The Madagaskar Plan by Guy Saville imagines an alternate history where a Nazi victory in World War II brings thier “final solution” even closer (available July 28, 2015).

The year is 1953. There is peace in Europe, but a victorious Germany consolidates power in Africa. The lynchpin to its final solution is Madagaskar. Hitler has ordered the resettlement of European Jews to the remote island.

British forces conspire to incite colony-wide revolt, resting their hopes on the expertise of Reuben Salois, an escaped leader of Jewish resistance.

Ex-mercenary Burton Cole scours the island for his wife and child. But as chaos descends and the Nazis brutally suppress the nascent insurrection, Cole must decide whether he is master of-or at the mercy of-history.

Chapter One

Schädelplatz, Deutsch Kongo

26 January 1953, 06:30

Panzer crews called it Nashornstahl: rhino steel. It was supposed to be impregnable. A girder of it had been welded across the entrance.

The Fall by R.J. Pineiro is a sci-fi thriller where a man jumps from the outermost reaches of the atmosphere and disappears, landing on Earth five years in the future, a future where he's already dead (available July 28, 2015).

Jack Taylor has always been an adrenaline junkie. As a federal contractor, he does dangerous jobs for the government that fall out of the realm of the SEALS and the Marines. And this next job is right up his alley. Jack has been assigned to test an orbital jump and if it works, the United States government will have a new strategy against enemy countries.

Despite Jack's soaring career, his personal life is in shambles. He and his wife Angela are both workaholics and are on the verge of getting a divorce. But the night before his jump, Jack and Angela begin to rekindle their romance and their relationship holds promise for repair. Then comes the day of Jack's big jump. He doesn't burn up like some predicted—instead, he hits the speed of sound and disappears.

Jack wakes up in an alternate universe. One where he died during a mission five years earlier and where Angela is still madly in love with him. But in this world, his boss, Pete, has turned to the dark side, is working against him, and the government is now on his tail. Jack must return to his own world but the only way for him to do that is to perform another orbital jump. This time is more difficult though—no one wants to see him go.

Long before Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, or Zane Grey thought about swinging up into a saddle,women were blazing a trail for the Western story. Even prior to 1902 with Owen Wister’sThe Virginian which is widely respected as the novel that put the genre on the map, female authors were far ahead on the drive. Some may consider James Fenimore Cooper’s romanticized “Leatherstocking Tales” series as a forerunner of the Western, but the genre as we know it can be traced back to 1860 with Ann S. Stephens’ Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, and as Western historian Ron Scheernotes in How the West Was Written Vol. I 1880-1906, women like Mary Hallock Foote (The Led-Horse Claim, 1883) and Helen Hunt Jackson (Ramona, 1884) had nearly a twenty-year jump on the celebrated Wister.

Though the men may have muscled their way through the batwing doors in ever greater numbers, seizing the spotlight, the ladies were there at the start and have been maintaining the high standard for over 155 years. Here are three modern wordslingers—Washburn, Mims, and Foley—who are still leading the charge.